Tag: Art

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Aesthetics

Day 1580 and Learn By Doing

Techne and episteme are foundational concepts in Greek philosophy. Practical knowledge and theoretical understanding are interwoven for humans.

Aristotle distinguished between five virtues of thought: technê, epistêmê, phronêsis, sophia, and nous, with techne translating as “craft” or “art” and episteme as “knowledge”

Via Wikipedia

As I enjoyed a brief trip to the academy last week I am myself considering how much meaning I derive from knowledge or episteme comes from my enjoyment of applying and experimenting with techne in my daily life.

As I’ve been pondering my own thought and it how it will change in this new era of artificial intelligence I find a calling to practice the virtues of thought in all its forms.

I have a love of chemistry and its applications in beauty. I find virtue in aesthetics and I enjoy many practices within it. Beauty is virtue with a long cultural history. Feminine cultural traditions of potions, cosmetics, and ablutions are an intertwining of disciplines that reflect our embodied humanity within our natural world.

And so in considering how I like to solve for my own pursuit of personal beauty I engaged with a friends interest in pursuing a personal routine that matched her needs, her heritage, her time and her resources. I wrote her an issue and packaged together a set of samples across all those variables with my own library of cosmetics.

A routine of cosmetics based on a set of inputs for a particular girlfriend

I’d love to formalize a way of sharing my knowledge and the flavors of personalization as it’s an enjoyable process of inputs with clear joyful outputs that I hope makes the daily life of someone better. And that might be how I teach myself the use of some new tools.

A Pareto optimal skincare test for under $100 a year
Categories
Community Politics Startups

Day 1571 and Townie Done Good

I am excited to be a panelist at an academic conference at my hometown’s university later this week.

While I didn’t attend the University of Colorado at Boulder myself, as a townie kid it holds a special place as educational institution in my life.

Their libraries lent me books, I attended events like their famed Conference on World Affairs and I made use of campus facilities from sports fields to their planetarium.

CU Boulder helped make me who I am today. Which is apparently someone who is qualified to weigh in on challenging topics in technology and culture.

The conference is called Renegade Futurism: Tech and the New Political Counterculture

Tech” isn’t like other industries. In addition to money and products, it is now a source for politicians, policy, culture, and philosophies with unprecedented influence throughout the globe. Figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel hardly count as mere industrialists; they function as thought-leaders and government operatives.  
 

This two-day conference gathers actors from today’s tech world–entrepreneurs, makers, thinkers, observers, and critics–to discuss the meaning of the tech counterculture, and what it might entail for the future of technology and American democracy.     

Hosted by the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization on Friday April 25th and Saturday April 26th and it is open to the community so if you are nearby please consider registering and attending.

The speaker line up is very impressive from politicians like our very own governor Jared Polis to journalists like James Pogue and entrepreneurs, operators and industrialists like myself.

My topic is first thing and the panelists are well worth being up early to learn from.

April 25th Atlas Building ATLS 100 – Cofrin Auditorium

9:00AM-10:15AM “How dissident is today’s tech?”

Technology can be a democratizing tool or a weapon of centralized authority. If those are perennial alternatives in technology’s history, which has predominated during recent years?

Panel: Michael Gibson, Jeff Schullenberger, Patrick Deneen, Julie Fredrickson
Moderator: Paul Diduch

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1569 and The Sky Above The Port Tuned To A Dead Channel

I spent the night in a port city in Greece as I am making my way back to Western Europe. I’ll be crossing by airplane via polar routes on my way to Colorado next week for an academic conference at my home town university.

I feel like I’ve made it when I am invited to speak on topics like Renegade Futurism. I’m now old enough to have lived a couple rounds in the “dissident technology” discourse so I hope to have something of value to say to new generations.

“You can’t get the little pricks generation gap you.” Molly Millions Neuromancer

On the long drive back from Istanbul I am listening to William Gibson’s Neuromancer to set myself in the right mood after the mix of antiquity and modernity I encountered this week.

One doesn’t cross thousands of kilometers and centuries of empires without requiring a bit of an aesthetic change.

Sunnier ports than in Gibson’s Neuromancer

The weather is more sunny Mediterranean Easter weekend than the non-climate skies of a future Japan’s Chiba and Night City, but with really any port city at night I can’t help but think of the famous first line of cyperpunk’s foremost novel.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer

And so I tuned in to a story of oligarchy, artificial intelligence, dissident coders and cyborgs with mirror shades. In that near future the protagonists make a stopover in Istanbul too and it involves medically advanced nervous system treatments too. Gibson’s cyborg chop shops are almost as advanced as what I saw this week.

Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy

Gibson’s 1984 novel is as relevant in 2025 as it ever was. Our timeline has become his later work in uncanny ways but his cyperpunk aesthetic has become as timeless as the domes of Constantinople.

The elephants eye domes of a hammam

Whatever transition we are about to make as humans as our own Wintermute intelligences arrive will be rocky. I don’t know who will be the dissidents and how centralizing power may prove to be.

One can just start to see corporate post-nation states emerge. Maybe they will look like Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Maybe it will look like Elon Musk’s family office Excession. Of course, that’s an entirely different science fiction novel about artificial intelligence.

Polybius’s cycles of political revolution chart
Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1564 and Driving Along the Wine Dark Sea

The road to Constantinople is long. Whether a knight on horseback crusade bound or a bitch in an Audi, it’s a long haul to Istanbul.

That’s not me flexing honest just that the rental guy sold me on the quattro as a comfortable ride for long hauls so for you cavalry types it’s the destrier of our times.

My route is basically hugging the Aegean. I drove down the Adriatic, nodded at the Ionian and spent an evening on the Aegean before breaking at Thessaloniki. The reverse was no picnic for Odysseus and he started in Troy. Which is around the corner relatively thinking.

Unlike our friends in antiquity, I have further to go to make it to the capital of empires that is Istanbul.

I’m excited for both the work on the ground but also to see the sights. Making it across multiple border crossings is absolutely worth to see the intersection of so much history. Oh and also to tour a factory.

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Aesthetics Culture

Day 1554 and Complex Coordination

I’ve never been much for listening to music while I do work. I’ve always found it distracting if not downright annoying. I don’t really believe I’m capable of multitasking. If a task requires my focus and coordination it will get the sum of it.

I’m not convinced anyone is particularly good at it if the studies on focus and multitasking are to be believed. Task switching costs, reduced cognitive efficiency and mental fatigue are typical indicators of the distraction of multitasking.

I was given a reminder of the strain of complex coordination as I was relaxing last night. I enjoy Star Trek: The Next Generation and found myself rewatching Data’s Day,” Season 4, Episode 11 in which Dr Crusher teaches Commander Data how to dance before a wedding.

Being an android, Data is able to easily mimic the doctor’s movement after being shown them. But as he learns to the nuances involved in waltzing with the partner he tells doctor (paraphrasing)

“This is complex set of variables to coordinate”

“Try to act like you are enjoying it!”

As Data tries to integrate the dance moves, their joint body language, the changing direction, and variable speeds you get a visceral sense of why embodied compute requires more processing than intelligence tasks. The final challenge? Smiling while coordinating it all.

Resting Android face? Data tries to smile while waltzing via Memory Alpha
Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

We are in a moment of narrative collapse. The elites who we’ve typically take our “consensus reality” cues from don’t know where to land in order to manage the revolt of the public and you can see the recycling of big ideas happening at a rapid pace.

If you’ve been on the internet at all recently, you were probably exposed to both Ezra Klein’s Abundance book tour and the Studio Ghibli mania using AI to turn iconic images into Miyazaki animations.

I think these two events are more related than you might think. Labor is becoming simultaneously more and less productive in the face of artificial intelligence. This naturally has consequences for power.

This progress is either “an insult to life itself” if you are Miyazaki or offers the potential to improve human productivity in ways we’ve not seen since the Industrial Revolution.

Which brings us back to the moderate state capacity liberals and Ezra Klein’s book tour. They are out in the cold politically and yet rather than produce a new narrative they’re re-heating the work of the meme movement effective accelerationism.

I’m pleased to see total narrative victory for e/acc over the effective altruists. Sustainability (or worse degrowth) has simply failed to resonate with our primate hierarchies that demand more. We want more of whatever other monkey’s have be it bananas or status.

Socialist zero sum politics encouraging sharing & collectively managing resources having been roundly beaten in the zeitgeist, the moderate left are insisting that actually public state mechanism are the best means to achieve abundance. Government is good actually.

Making the case for the state’s role in creating abundance is about all they have left while they wait for the pain of Trump’s tariff policies to kick in. The private markets not having the necessary time frames for long term planning is a perennial issue.

Even our most productive technology companies are feeling the pinch to perform immediately in the short term. Alex Danco dropped on essay on where we might be in the S-curve of artificial intelligence.

He argues that perhaps in the scaling of this infrastructure we may change our thinking around code as “the primary asset” of software companies and reorient it back to the shared labor, management and final product of the traditional corporation. Software companies were valued for capital efficiency by the markets but perhaps that constant no longer applies.

All this worry about creating abundance is a battle of who decides how we allocate future resources (which we don’t yet have) and who will receive the biggest share of power and plaudits in the process.

The fact that we can replicate aesthetics in an instant or do the document work of a dozen legal associates with a program isn’t really the issue at hand. We are worried that how we divvy up the sum of all our hierarchies is changing. Of course that worries every primate. It’s bloody stuff.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1527 and Wayback Machine

I just finished watching the 8th season of Netflix’s mega reality TV hit Love is Blind.

It feels as if they produce a new America version every quarter but if that’s not enough content for you there are spinoffs in Sweden, Japan, Mexico, the United Kingdom and Argentina.

They shoot them roughly a year ahead of time. Which, in any other era in my lifetime, would have been fast turn around time. You could figure basic values would hold from year to year. But culture changes very rapidly now.

So reality tv that was shot even a year ago now makes for some very odd viewing as America’s politics and “current thing” are in constant flux.

February and March of 2024 did not have the vibe shift we are in now. I won’t spoiler it should you be considering the show but I will say it’s fascinating to see how much politics played into the women’s decisions.

Now maybe it’s because it’s the Minnesota season they felt they had to address certain topics in race relations after the summer of 2020.

But they also went to places on queer issues, religion and national politics that did absolutely nothing to make any situation better.

Looking back on one’s previous view of the world is not always pleasant. That we have a way back thanks to media makes for a strange continuity of views that probably do little to do with stuff of a happy love filled life. Perhaps a good reminder to not look too much to the past to decide your future. Or a reminder to focus on what never changes.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1451 and Kiki Boot Bust

One of my resolutions for 2025 is to use LinkedIn. I know it’s a little weird, but a whole swathe of professionals simply don’t Tweet, shit post or blog.

Many professionals brand themselves with polished post on more poised platforms. Their branding is less about authenticity or raw insights and more about composure.

As I’ve been popping in to my old “work” networks and encountering long lost colleagues from my past life in the lifestyle trenches of fashion, beauty and luxury I’ve noticed a grim trend amongst the composed and polished.

These professionals were concerned that in the wider style industry, quality has all but disappeared while costs are way up.

Katharine K. Zarrella an editor with long standing has a scathing opinion piece in the New York Times about the state of the business. Obscene Prices, Declining Quality: Luxury is in a Death Spiral.

Like my sad Kiki boots, much of old-school luxury — the kind that was so glamorous, lush and exquisite that everyone understood it, many craved it and few could have it — is beyond repair. Once-revered establishments that prided themselves on craftsmanship, service and cultivating a discerning and loyal customer base have become mass-marketing machines that are about as elegant and exclusive as the Times Square M&M’s store.

Everyone has their own style and preferences naturally. When everyone from the tried and true heritage heads to the nouveau grunge appreciators complain that everything is crap and there is far too much of it then a we’ve got a problem.

Ms Zarrella’s Marc Jacob platform boots may be more Doc Martin Hot Topic than my own preference but I doubt I could replace my beloved kitten heel knee high Gucci boots either. We are both stuck with expensive choices that won’t last.

I’ve simply stopped shopping anywhere but a few select unbranded stores like Italic. Repairs are the only option if you have existing pieces you love. There are no replacements available. Even if you are willing to pay the new prices the quality is terrible.

Freshly repaired by LeatherSpa after seventeen years of service on the mean streets of New York
Categories
Community Culture

Day 1438 and the Circuit

Cool is as scarce as a resource as our species has ever encountered. We plunder and horde cool like the spice in Dune even though absolutely anyone is capable of becoming cool.

I know you probably want to argue but Julie I’ve never been cool or no one I know is cool. Well I’m sorry but that’s actually a skills issue and you can be a part of culture.

Anyone can become cool by not giving too many fucks about the rules. Notice I didn’t say “no fucks” as obviously there are rules and gatekeepers and all kinds of ways to modulate what I’ll call cultural capital.

It’s not too hard to become a polite participant in the unwritten rules of culture. If you are additive to any of ways we create, propagate and monetize culture you will be welcomed in once you learn to contribute.

Looking for a toehold? One of the ways we decide on who and what is cool is simply by showing up to the various nodes of wealth and power I’ll call the circuit. An artist mutual of mine calls it the city with legs.

If you are curious and want to participate the the circuit roughly encapsulates the vacation and social calendars of our global elite class. And it’s quite public and often reasonable accessible if you are curious enough to research. Read the styles section and you notice the repetition.

It’s a more diverse group than you might think. It’s certainly more open to than when society was run by a hereditary aristocracy. Yet it’s still contained enough that anyone on the circuit jokes it’s the same old thing.

Sometimes folks complain that you never meet anyone new on the circuit and it’s true you encounter the same people over and over again. You will probably see me from time to time. Power likes cool because cool is a powerful determinant of wealth and status.

If you attend the main fashion weeks, the world economic forum, the Met Gala, Art Basel, Formula 1 races, the awards seasons, or the main conferences you have encountered the circuit. If you have met someone who winters or summers somewhere then you have seen the circuit.

Maybe just as a townie but you’ve seen it. Even a cat can look at a king. If you’d like to hop on the circuit be sure to bring something to the table. The thing about culture is we are always looking for new faces. You too can try out being cool just for fun. Break a few rules but maybe ask someone on it which ones they follow to get a feel for it first.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1421 and Culture Clashes

I sit in between half a dozen different community nodes thanks to my interests in open source software, decentralization, crypto, and autonomous systems technology.

This set of interest covers a lot of ground from ecosystem level collaboration in financial organizations like DAOs and to player versus AI agents coordination to peripheral control of drones and machinery.

Many different demographics are attracted to these frontiers for different reasons. Hackers have a very different mentality than mercenary technologists looking for maximum margin.

Open source has traditionally struggled more from a lack of financialization than from an obsession with it. Which seems less true in the crypto era than in previous more academic and defense oriented eras.

There are classic open source business models and anyone with age and experience in startups has some opinions which I leave as an exercise to the reader. They occasionally fail and an open core loses more than they’d like to professional services. I am writing on WordPress.

One strange aspect of what drives these frontier spaces to interact is that depending on how much leverage you find in building a network you may have different incentives than other builders and users. Expanding out to scaled use may drive a lot more value than the resources required. How the surplus gets divided is always contentious.

For some, the most crucial cultural goals is expanding access to automation and ripping away as many of the services and middle men as is feasible.

Decentralized systems make it harder for middle men to maintain monopolies. Thats its own goal for true believers. For others the goal massive financialization that drives network connectivity is the benefit. Self interest driving common goals is perfectly acceptable.

As I watch the current season of hyper self interested memecoin cryptomania engage with the academic utopian open source artificial intelligence community, I am reminded of so many of the classic issues we have in financing and sharing in the spoils of common infrastructure. Who benefits is a question we should all be asking more regularly